School Daze

The girls have completed a month of school (Naomi is actually in pre-school, and for consistency we also refer to Muriel's baby holding pen as school), and I am pleased to say that the report is so far, so good. I usually time Muriel's drop off to coincide nicely with breakfast, so when I get there, there is a gaggle of toddlers sitting in teeny chairs, munching on incongruous pairings like pancakes and canned green beans. Mmmm. Muriel loves getting into one of these chairs and participating in the group snack. She is a sociable creature, noticeably more so than Naomi was at this age. She gets excited to see the teachers, she blows kissses when we leave, and does her random, non-directional hand waving. From the teachers' accounts, she enjoys music time, does a great job eating her lunch, and is especially fond of playing with dirt outside. Whee!

I would compare Naomi's initial reaction to school to a fervent crush. She LOVED school the first week or two, because at school there are teachers who are kind and friendly to three-year-olds. She is an adult-centric child, and this made it especially frustrating for her when her grandparents didn't know what to do with her for three months. She has settled down a bit, and more importantly, she has shifted her focus onto her peers. Hurray! We hear about her friends, we count them up (there are seven!), we talk about one in particular who seems a little bi-polar with her "play with me, no, don't play with me now" behavior every other day. Naomi seems unfazed by her flip-flopping, even though we are dying to rig her up with a hidden panda-cam to figure out just what the heck motivates three year olds in the "dolphin" class to accept and reject friendship overtures from minute to minute.

We visted a handful of preschools before settling on this one. I had thought a Montessori school might be good for Naomi, considering the glimpses of OCD I see in her, and my own anxieties about being able to model self-motivated learning (I am externally motivated in the worst way). We saw a few that were really fantastic. The one we chose, though, is close to our house, inexpensive, Montessori-inspired (close enough!), and has a shabby, comfortable feel to it, which I mean in the best possible way. It is the preschool that alleviates any concern you might have that you are in some way related to those people you hear about in New York City that call in all their favors to get the editor of the Times to write their two-year-old a letter of reference for admission to the preschool that will fast-track their kid to Yale or whatever.

Only time will tell whether this place sends Naomi to the Ivies, but in the meantime, here is a list of things she has learned at school in the past month:

"Ewwww!" All the cool kids at school must say Ewww! to just about anything that happens, because Naomi does it all the time now. Ewwww! Underpants! Ewwww, a baby wipe- I'm not a baby! Ewwww! Pee!

"Criss cross applesauce" = the new "Indian Style"... Everybody sit down, criss cross applesauce!

"Zip it, lock it, put it in your pocket." - Ha! If I were in just the right mood, I might be bothered by this, but most of the time I think it's really funny, and I have already tried using it on Jim, with undesirable results.

Songs, songs, songs. She can sing "America the Beautiful" all the way through ("above the fruit and planes!"), "I'm a Little Teapot," which I had purposefully never taught her because I have always found it a little too cutesy, a song for lining up to the tune of "The Farmer in the Dell"..."I'm ready for the hall, I'm standing nice and tall...", and my super fave rave, a days of the week song set to the tune of "The Addams Family":

There's Sunday and there's Monday. There's Tuesday and there's Wednesday. There's Thursday and there's Friday, and then there's Saturday.
Days of the week. (clap clap)
Days of the week. (clap clap)
Days of the week, days of the week, days of the week. (clap clap)

In case you were looking for a song to get stuck in your head for 72 hours.